On the "yelling at me" part - I find this an absolutely puzzling design pattern that a number of automakers have adopted. I was driving a Volkswagen ID4 - their mid-size electric car - the other day, and my dog was on the back seat.
She triggered the seat belt alarm, but not straight away, only once we were on the German Autobahn. It showed the icon on the dashboard, then it started beeping. Then it started beeping louder. Finally, it settled into a loud, high pitched beep that continued throughout my drive, designed to force me to obey.
This is directly dangerous. I'm going 130km/h - what the fuck am I supposed to do about the seatbelts now? Not that I even wanted to...
It is this idea of "forcing your customer to obey by inflicting discomfort" that's puzzling me. I can't think of any other industry or product that would think this would be a good idea. Just show me the damn icon and if I decide to ignore it, that's my choice...
”In 2003, the Transportation Research Board Committee, chaired by two psychologists, reported that "Enhanced SBRs" (ESBRs) could save an additional 1,000 lives a year.[100] Research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Ford's ESBR, which provides an intermittent chime for up to five minutes if the driver is unbelted, sounding for 6 seconds then pausing for 30, increased seat belt use by 5 percentage points.[100] Farmer and Wells found that driver fatality rates were 6% lower for vehicles with ESBR compared with otherwise-identical vehicles without.[101]” [1]
Not asking nicely for seat belt makes people actually use the seat belt. It’s saving bunch of people every year vs annoying me. And it sure does annoy me, but truth be told sometimes when I move the car just a bit the only reason I use seat belt is that the car is angry at me.
That's the driver, but I've had similar problems with the car yelling at me when I put a sufficiently heavy bag of shopping on the passenger seat.
The only seat where the weight is guaranteed to be a human is the drivers seat. By all means, put an alarm on that seat, but the other seats can contain things other than passengers.
Yes to clarify the false positives are also the thing that annoy me. Not when the system works as intended. But as somebody else said here if you have a passenger it really makes a difference to the social situation. I don’t know that much about safety engineering, but my hunch is that if there was a bypass button it would weaken the system significantly. Maybe it could be temporary and deep in the menu.
Worth noting that something heavy enough to trigger the seat occupancy sensor can still do you a lot of damage as it flies around the inside of a car in a crash. I put the seatbelt on around boxes and bags if they're on the seat.
I have child seat in my back seat secured to designated attachment points (not the seatbelt) and its heavy enough to warn me EVERY time. It's secured, not dangerous, and is a persistent false positive. Badly designed systems can also do harm by training people to ignore them or even actively circumvent them.
Something like this happened in my Skoda a while ago. Driving along on the Autobahn when a really minor irregularity in the road caused the bag I had placed on the passenger seat to be pushed into the seat very gently, triggering the passenger-side seat belt alarm. I had to take the next exit and park somewhere to get it to shut up.
Unrelated but also relevant to the story: My father's new car (a brand-new Nissan) starts yelling at you to put the seat belt on the second you start the car. It's really annoying because the rest of the car systems take their precious time to start up, so I like to start the car first so the stupid computers start booting and THEN put my seat belt on. But that means being bullied by a loud alarm every time someone uses that car. Why oh why? My Audi only starts the alarm once you actually start driving, and even then only if you go faster than 10km/h or something.
> It is not uncommon for bags to go through the front windscreen and kill someone in the car that crashes into you.
With respect.
It's uncommon to crash.
It's rare to have a 10kg bag in your car.
It's vanishingly unlikely to have a 10kg bag in a position where it can fly through the front windshield and hit, and kill, someone in the car that crashes into you.
Of course there's enough kilometers driven that it happens, but that doesn't make it anywhere close to 'not uncommon'.
In this case, it was a light shoulder bag containing only a laptop. Considering it's height, it should have bashed into the glove box area on impact.
Stripping it down might indeed be more secure, but how do you properly strip that down with only the seat belt?
There are exceptions, also in France. I think the most relevant one here is for medical reasons or body shape. So if you have a passenger who is exempt from the rule you have to live with your car yelling at you.
on the flipside, one of my first times when learning to ride a car, I was so focused on adjusting the mirror and seat that I forgot to put on my seatbelt. I was able to get out of the parking lot and get onto a pretty busy road with semi-high speed before the alarm went off!
the alarm mostly stressed me out more than realizing I was not wearing a seatbelt, which only made it harder to find a suitable exit so I could stop the car and put the belt on!
I think this is mostly an edge case though, because I probably held a much lower speed than expected in the parking lot due to being very inexperienced behind the wheel.
My dad spent most of his working life on "preaching" road safety for the local health service, reviewing all the data in the world (more or less) to tell people what works and what doesn't.
Unfortunately, one thing he learned is that every measure of forceful compliance is consistently more successful in preventing accidents and deaths. Seatbelts save lives, but they had to be made compulsory by law to drill the concept into people; and even with that, it takes un-inescapable annoyances like this alarm to get into compliance that last 5-10% of stubborn idiots who just won't do the right thing. Full-face helmets save lives, but so many people insist in using pointless "bowls" or even nothing at all. Respecting speed limits save lives, but it takes speed cameras to actually persuade people to do that. Etc etc.
The technical implementations can always improve, of course. And tbh, it takes nothing to fix the issue reported: just fasten the belt "empty" when you have the dog (and accept the poor thing will not survive an impact...). The industry is what it is because People Are Bad At Risk-Assessment, and that's that.
This raises a more fundamental moral issue: if I want to be stupid and I'm only endangering myself - why should't I?
I firmly believe that it's not the government's or automakers role to keep me from harming myself - but it is the governments role to protect others from being harmed by me. Consequently, I believe the government should outlaw drunk driving as it endangers others, but it should not force me to wear a helmet on a motorcycle.
Just to be clear: I absolutely believe you SHOULD wear a helmet while motorcycling - but I believe if I choose not to and by doing so am only endangering myself, that's my choice.
> if I want to be stupid and I'm only endangering myself - why should't I?
I hear you, but - on the road you're not alone even after you die. Someone will have to pick up your remains, see your brain splattered all over the road, and live with the trauma forever. Someone will have to try and resuscitate you, taking time that could be spent helping someone else. Worse, partial helmets could save your life but still get you partially paralized or disfigured, which would further burden society and yourself (treatment etc).
Note I'm a rider myself (bonneville ftw), and yeah full-face helmet doesn't fit my Easy Rider fantasy, but if it spares myself and others from the worst consequences, I'm ok with it.
"no man is an island" and in most circumstances you're not alone when driving, unless you're on your private farmland or something.
moving fast enough to hurt or kill you in a car means you're going fast enough to damage or kill whatever you hit, too. even if that turns out to be a ditch or tree, you're still running into something.
pulling your corpse and smashed vehicle out of a ditch is going to cost someone something, even if no one else died.
It's a wider problem than just the seatbelts. The whole cockpit of a car is now a distraction from the most critical thing - driving safely.
For reasons I don't understand, tactile push buttons, with physical feedback, for most tasks are increasingly being replaced with a touch screen you have to look at rather than looking at the road instead and just reaching over to the dashboard.
Hanlon's Razor? It feels like the national road safety bodies world wide, have dropped the ball on this one.
I sat in a friend's Mercedes and the central display had a big flashy full screen warning that said something along the lines of "Don't let [name of their software package] distract you from driving!".
It seems the irony of screaming for your attention only to tell you not to pay attention was lost on them.
The annoying alarm is actually useful so you don't have to shout on your mother in law to get her damn seatbelt. It does the dirty work for you, you don't have to be that annoying person asking for people to put their seatbelt in your car.
In cases like you encountered with your dog, just put the seatbelt on your dog or bag / boxes. It's actually safer for you in case of a crash, they wont get flying into your face. If it's not possible, just put the seatbelt on under your dog just to silence the alarm
> It is this idea of "forcing your customer to obey by inflicting discomfort" that's puzzling me. I can't think of any other industry or product that would think this would be a good idea.
Telephones. The original UK ringtone was explicitly designed to be as irritating as possible (some really weird time signature, I think?)
Even with the chest harness, she can switch seats. You have to put the seatbelts on the empty seats as well, but that makes it harder for her to lie down comfortably.
No, its allowed to stop for emergencies. I agree that having a dog on the back seats is not an emergency but the intended purpose of the alarm would be having someone on the back seat who could not fasten their seatbelt. I don't know if that would count as an emergency in a German court but I certainly would count it as a emergency (and it would be illegal).
The problem with a tesla is that it is like a finicky partner.
You're in love. It is romantic. smooth, sleep touchscreen for everything feels so modern. It is a better car than ICE, hands down. Everything that was before was terrible.
And everything is getting better!
But at some point, you realize some things are never going to change, and you are going to have to live with it.
- it is dangerously hard to use any control that doesn't have a dedicated button. The touchscreen in a moving car is a moving mess of tiny targets crowded too close together
- even if you have a dedicated control for say wipers, you will still curse interval wipers.
- if you get a newer car, you (basically) won't HAVE any dedicated controls. no turn signal stalk. No gear stalk - PRND - it will guess for you (really)
- some functions - tesla doesn't care about, and never will.
- don't get a flat tire if you care about your time. If you can't change a spare, nvm.
- going forward - cram all controls/settings and information displays into a small ipad. You are all peons, you get less control/safety/information because tesla wants fewer warranty claims.
I just got a new car (not a tesla), it has it has controls that have dedicated buttons, it does have a touchscreen, and turn signal stalk, check. gear stalk? that's been gone ages ago. I have a/c control buttons, radio dials, volume knob. Don't have a spare, but that's standard. They used to pack a real full size tire before they started with that extra small spare tire crap, then finally they just give you a kit that can repair your tire. The touchscreen is not small, and no there's not a lot of tiny targets crowded too close together. They're fairly spread out and all the controls are about 3 finger widths apart. Not everyone gets a tesla.
... what does roadside assistance do in that scenario? They can't be carrying spare tires of every variety, and the equipment to fit them.. this just sounds like a terrible non-solution to a solved problem.
Yeah, my 2015 car came with an optional spare wheel which eats up a significant part of the not very big trunk. Haven't used it the last 9 years so I get why people opt for the repair kit. The chance of having a tire leak probably depends a lot on the quality of the roads where you drive.
> - it is dangerously hard to use any control that doesn't have a dedicated button. The touchscreen in a moving car is a moving mess of tiny targets crowded too close together
No it isn't.
> - even if you have a dedicated control for say wipers, you will still curse interval wipers.
Sensor-based wipers fail to predict rain regularly. I discussed this topic recently with a friend, her Mercedes has the same problem and it does have a sensor.
> - if you get a newer car, you (basically) won't HAVE any dedicated controls. no turn signal stalk. No gear stalk - PRND - it will guess for you (really)
That's a valid point. But it remains to be seen how much of a problem this is. Certainly other manufacturers (Volkswagen ID.4 for example) cramp many more buttons on the steering wheel.
> - some functions - tesla doesn't care about, and never will.
Like what?
> - don't get a flat tire if you care about your time. If you can't change a spare, nvm.
Most modern cars don't have a reserve tire. Not sure what you're talking about.
> - going forward - cram all controls/settings and information displays into a small ipad. You are all peons, you get less control/safety/information because tesla wants fewer warranty claims.
At least in Germany most manufacturers do this - and not only for electric cars. Many modern cars do not contain a spare tire. And this has been widely reported for at least 10 years now.
I generally find it really strange that so many articles single out Tesla to complain about issues that apply to many new cars. But maybe the US market is very different and maybe in the US Teslas really are very different from other cars.
My 2012 car has no spare tire, you are instead mandated to use run-flat tires (on those, you can still drive 80 km at a lower speed). This is pretty common.
My 2022 Mercedes has no spare tire, and there's no room for one under the trunk bed. I was told the tires are run-flat tires. Which I guess is fine for some short distance, but after that, I'll be SOL. Really wish there was a spare. And I'm sure when the tires need replacement, they'll be much more expensive than the regular non-run-flat ones.
Touchscreens demand I look away from my surroundings, because I will never know where anything is nor if I did whatever I wanted to do correctly. That is fundamentally terrible as regards safe driving.
Can you give an example of something that really needs to be adjusted on the touchscreen while driving that cannot be adjusted using the buttons on the steering wheel on the Model 3? I never ever need to do this.
Additionally the lane keeping and adaptive cruise control on the highway are rock solid, so even if you would look briefly - for example at the navigation system, just like in any other car - not much can happen.
Regarding looking away - in Europe we are taught in driving school to look over our left shoulder when changing lanes. So we take the eyes of the road ahead FAR longer than a brief peak at a touchscreen. Yet this is deemed to be acceptable and safer even in a car that does not keep the lane and does not automatically break if there is an obstacle in front.
>using the buttons on the steering wheel on the Model 3?
I suppose I should clarify I am speaking generally, I don't own nor have I ever driven a Tesla. I have, however, had to deal with touchscreen controls in recent years.
>even if you would look briefly
>a brief peak at a touchscreen.
The thing about touchscreens is they demand more than just a "brief" "peak". I need to look at it, obviously, and also devote considerable attention and mental processing to comprehending what's on the screen and then moving my hand and finger as necessary.
I can't rely on muscle memory or peripheral sensory feedback, because nothing is ever in the same, consistent place on a touchscreen nor is there any useful tactile or auditory feedback. I must decipher the touchscreen every time and hope to dear god the shitsilicon running the thing can process my input in a timely and reliable manner (spoiler: it won't).
One time, the touchscreen controls for the AC locked up and stayed broken until I turned the entire car off and back on when I was done with that leg of driving.
Touchscreen controls in a car are a driving hazard, I would argue worse than "text and drive" smartphones.
The fact is that you don't have to look at all, because the Tesla touchscreen does not have modalities. (There is a drill-down menu that you NEVER need to open during driving). Everything else is accessible in exactly the same spot at the bottom of the screen and no looking is required.
Additionally, as I said, the steering wheel buttons handle everything that matters, so there is no need to even interact with the touchscreen at all during driving.
Let's look at the interactions in detail:
- Most controls of the car are done using physical controls. This includes left and right blinking, reversing, steering, lights, wipers, honking, the acceleration and break pedals, windows, seats, doors, opening compartments, audio and media controls, autopilot and lane keeping, camera controls.
- The only things where interaction with the touchscreen is preferable are (a) setting a destination in the navigation system - for going home or to work this is literally a swipe gesture on the main screen, usually done before the car is started and (b) adjusting the heating or temperature. For this there are two buttons at the bottom of the screen, always in the same location. However I always have them on auto and there is simply no need to fiddle with this, ever. If it's important to you it can be configured to be on the steering wheel as well.
- I think people who think that constant adjustment of the temperature settings is necessary are used to driving cars where this is not sufficiently automated. I have seat and wheel heating set to auto and that works just fine. I have set my temperature to 20 °C and it feels comfortable in summer and winter. Why would I want to change this while driving?
- Setting a new destination in the navigation system can be done using voice. This is not great but will certainly be improved. A modern system like Whisper should handle this easily. In any case, why would anyone want to do this while driving? And in any case it will be the same issue in any other car, because this simply requires typing out letters which is difficult.
> I would argue worse than "text and drive" smartphones.
Obviously holding a phone and typing out text on a tiny keyboard that certainly has to be looked at takes far more focus than touching a pre-defined spot on a huge fixed screen. But as I said this is never needed.
> - if you get a newer car, you (basically) won't HAVE any dedicated controls. no turn signal stalk. No gear stalk - PRND - it will guess for you (really)
What? How do you signal a turn then? How do you change the gear?
It concerns me to know that these vehicles are on the road around me. What a mess. I’ve never seen such a blatantly ridiculous gear shift control in my life.
> “Automatic” windshield wipers: This functionality is so insanely stupid. It regularly turns on when there is no rain, and regularly runs in the slowest speed when there’s tons of rain. I’ve read that this is because Elon vetoed a simple sensor that would have made this function as well as any other modern car. He was convinced the car’s AI could figure it out. It can’t.
Yep. First world problem for sure but so frustrating. And other first-world cars don't have this issue.
It is the same with the ultrasound reversing sensors that've been removed.. the Tesla Vision / AI simply is not as good and probably never will be in a dark carpark.
But in my own view, the reason for 'don't' is that against many expectations, the incumbents have largely caught up in the EV space and there are new entrants doing exceptionally well. Tesla's complacency might be what harms it the most.
If you read to the end, predictably, his biggest problem is Musk's politics...
The comparison to Apple is not particularly great. I don't know how distracted is Cook and what his politics are, but I am still dealing with major iphone bugs than apple never bothered to fix in years, like all the music artwork being randomly reschuffled. And the experience only gets worse with time with more aggressive nagging for Apple services, my phone feels like the web in the 1990s, pre adblockers.
> If you read to the end, predictably, his biggest problem is Musk's politics...
Not really sure how you got that; to me it seemed like more an afterthought. The author had already made his case before we got to the (fairly short) political section.
> That’s what the brain does: we learn not to see the ugly that we can’t change.
Huh. This must be what it's like to be a glass-half-full person. Speaking for myself, I tend to focus in on it rather obsessively.
> Elizabeth Holmes, at least, didn’t kill anyone.
Statistically, she almost certainly did.
> I’ve never actually thought that I needed a fart machine in my car, but pre-teens think it essential.
IMO this encourages bad behaviour, and should be banned. Its only apparent application seems to be startling pedestrians, potentially dangerously (obviously a horn would do this too, but the bad behaviour is more likely if it is made funnier to the sort of gormless idiots who indulge in this).
While I think that was once the case, today, thanks to Tesla's innovation(TM), you can treat passers-by to 100 decibel fart sounds: https://mashable.com/article/tesla-horn-fart
Anyone who _actually uses this_ should be shunned from society, of course.
A Tesla used to be called the "best car ever made" — eleven years ago.
In 2013 Consumer Reports called the Tesla Model S the best car it had ever tested. The Model S earned a score of 99 out of a possible 100 in the magazine's tests.
"If it could recharge in any gas station in three minutes, this car would score about 110," said Jake Fisher, head of auto testing for Consumer Reports. Fisher called the car's performance in the magazine's performance tests "off the charts."[1]
What happened in the last 11 years? Did Teslas get worse or did expectations change significantly?
Tesla focused on FSD almost exclusively and everything in the car's software suffered because of that and stupid decisions to remove hardware.
Autopilot is on a separate branch from FSD, not getting significant updates with the promise that at some point, it'll be merged with the FSD branch and it'll be super awesome - this year for sure, but maybe next year or 10 years after, look we made a robot that's definitely not a guy in a suit and it'll be out in 5 years, maybe 10, it can water plants now!, look a Cybertruck! isn't steel cool, etc
When they switched from Mobileye to their own stack, it noticeably regressed in performance, then they worked to get it to work decently, but dropped the radar during Covid, going all in on Vision, regressing it even further. They promised at that time to at some point match the original Autopilot by reintroducing a distance of 1 and a max speed higher than 140 km/h and it's been 2 years since then with nothing on the front.
Summon/ Smart summon as the guy in the article points out - is great, but doesn't work without USS sensors, which they removed and the functionality is coming back some day, but likely not soon, because it's not a priority. They've been selling cars for more than a year now that don't have that functionality, even though it's in a package worth 4000 euros that gets you basically nothing.
In the meantime FSD V11 will be the big one, V12 will finally drop the beta tag, etc, etc things that never happen and the rest of the functionalities just rot away.
I can't believe how much relentless online bitching there is about the sensors. You won't find anything approaching FSD in any other vehicle you could buy. Autopilot remains the most reliable autosteer product on the market. Smart summon sucks, so what - you won't find it on other cars and it might improve in a huge way with OTA. Unlike other cars. Autopark sucks big time. It might improve. It might not. Clearly, given the sales, online commentators care way more than actual consumers lol.
I think Model S is still quite good because it retains more physical creature comforts like turn signal, circular wheel, instrument panel, and hand-adjustable AC vents (in the model y, you can only change vent angle on the touch screen).
WTH is a “jammern” and why would this articles english writer use that foreign word in a sentence? I can’t be the only person who didn’t know what it meant and I was totally distracted from the article by their apparent presumption that the word was in common use.
A few legitimate but common complaints marred by a bunch of issues that aren’t common (my phone key works fine, Bluetooth is fine, etc) and completely unsubstantiated prediction that the runaway top seller of EVs, indeed the best selling cars several years running, will somehow “fail to compete” in the EV space
I personally think this prediction is grounded. It has been over-promising and under-delivering for a while, and Musk has gone from a money printing machine to someone perceived as toxic/erratic. They will face difficulties in a scenario where competitors can make better, cheaper cars, and their stock market value is not inflated to compensate for that.
I'm really having trouble understanding how a company with the best selling car on the entire planet (more Model Ys sold than Toyota Corollas or RAV4s in 2023) can be accused of "under-delivering".
Under-delivering is always compared to your promises. And they significantly over-promise, and, thus, consistently under-deliver. Especially at the company level - look at the Cybertruck and electric trucks - way over schedule, under powered, and under-delivering on every single metric they claimed originally. FSD is the other major example - which has been "fully autonomous safer than a human driver by the end of this year" for 5+ years already, and is none of those things in practice.
Also, while the sales are nothing to scoff at for such an expensive car, Tesla is still a small player in the world car market. Toyota sells more cars in the USA alone than Tesla sells worldwide (but much cheaper).
No other manufacturer comes close to Tesla's autonomy so it's not like people are gonna go and choose a competitor over that. Cybertruck, likewise, is amazing, so it really doesn't matter what the promise was as long as the product remains the best on the market, and sells. And their cars sell. Really well.
There are some apparently legitimate issues, followed by political grievances against Musk personally, written by a guy who describes himself as "law professor, activist". This kind of partisanship taints the whole article, and lessens its credibility.
If you think the kind of partisanship Lessig have taint anything negatively, you either do not know about him or hang in the wrong place imho. I happen to think he's mostly wrong and disagree with a lot of what he write (sorry, it's true), but I have to respect the thinker and his ideology.
>This was a question I used to get all the time. In 2016, we got rid of both of our cars and left the country on a sabbatical. When we returned, we bought a Tesla Model 3.
It's a wild introduction, something I would expect from someone like Lessig.
"I never drive without seatbelts, but it takes at least 5 seconds to get the seatbelts on. Why not just wait till you see I’m shifting into gear before you start yelling at me?"
Very confused by this, I never had the seatbelt chime appear before the car starts moving and I have the same model as the author. It also doesn't chime when you drive very slowly in a parking situation.
Could one argue Tesla's Marketing approach to FSD is almost machiavellian and targeted not at consumers but in actual fact, engineers to come and work for them?
If they do eventually be the first then all is forgiven (i.e. Fritz Haber is known for the Haber-Bosch process, and not for inventing mustard gas). If they don't, they'll slowly fade into irrelevancy and they'll end up as an MBA case study in 50 years.
If they're a company that seem the closest to solving the biggest problem in using auto-motives and you're a razor-sharp freshly graduated engineer, wouldn't you want to be on that train with ideas that you will actually significantly contribute to self-driving vehicles instead of...increasing Google's/Meta's Ad Revenue?
I'm not defending Tesla's approach, but interested if there's a bit more reasoning behind the inconsistency in the claims ("we're one year away, you better join us to matter!") and not just capitalism gone wild?
> Could one argue Tesla's Marketing approach to FSD is almost machiavellian and targeted not at consumers but in actual fact, engineers to come and work for them?
I think it's clear that it's targeting investors and is used to (successfully) pump the stock value much higher than what would be reasonable.
> Could one argue Tesla's Marketing approach to FSD is almost machiavellian and targeted not at consumers but in actual fact, engineers to come and work for them?
"We over-promote a product which is unfit for purpose, then vaguely claim it is a beta, as if that somehow makes the over-promotion okay" is generally the sort of thing that scares engineers away, rather than attracting them. Like, it's basically a poorly-run-company _trope_.
> If they're a company that seem the closest to solving the biggest problem in using auto-motives
I mean, maybe, if that were the case, but it clearly isn't. That would probably be Waymo.
Yeah this article is so full of weird issues I have never had. The whole bit about full self driving makes no sense to me. You are using the keycard instead of the phone key which misses the point completely. Its not as if other cars don’t have plenty of issues at any price point.
> But here’s where the CEO becomes relevant. Tesla is, in many ways, Elon Musk. Some parts are astonishing, inspiring, and good — what I’ve called above the car on down. Other parts are little more than lies and gimmicks.
From what I understand (and I may be completely wrong), those "astonishing and good" parts, about the design of the vehicle itself, were already mostly in place before Musk managed to place himself as Tesla's CEO (which is an interesting story in itself).
> From what I understand (and I may be completely wrong), those "astonishing and good" parts, about the design of the vehicle itself, were already mostly in place before Musk managed to place himself as Tesla's CEO (which is an interesting story in itself).
I find it very hard to know what's true about such a polarising figure. Personally I don't think it's likely that Musk has done what he's done without talent and a lot of hard work, especially in an age of constant iconoclasm. But I could be wrong.
I think a big part of the problem is that people tend to see things in black and white (or rather, fail to account for nuance).
Elon is a massively intelligent and business savvy guy with strong engineering talent.
He is also unhinged and an absolute idiot.
Both things are true at the same time and in different ways. People tend to let one of the two perspectives overwhelm their impression of him as a whole.
I think it depends how you assess people. It's "Says the thing a large group of us have deemed impolite" vs "Working hard to build an optimistic future based on large technological improvements". I can imagine people who take the time to be good at assessing either of those find it hard to care about or understand the other one.
> From what I understand (and I may be completely wrong), those "astonishing and good" parts, about the design of the vehicle itself, were already mostly in place before Musk managed to place himself as Tesla's CEO (which is an interesting story in itself).
You are completely wrong. Musk joined as the first major outside investor in February 2004, six months after the company's founding. The Roadster, Tesla's first automobile, did not come out until 2008.
She triggered the seat belt alarm, but not straight away, only once we were on the German Autobahn. It showed the icon on the dashboard, then it started beeping. Then it started beeping louder. Finally, it settled into a loud, high pitched beep that continued throughout my drive, designed to force me to obey.
This is directly dangerous. I'm going 130km/h - what the fuck am I supposed to do about the seatbelts now? Not that I even wanted to...
It is this idea of "forcing your customer to obey by inflicting discomfort" that's puzzling me. I can't think of any other industry or product that would think this would be a good idea. Just show me the damn icon and if I decide to ignore it, that's my choice...